"Release the kraken!"

I read Rachel Martin's interview with Rick Rubin a couple of days ago, and immediately ordered the book (The Creative Act: A Way of Being). It's scheduled to arrive today. I see Jack Baty is already reading it.

I'm also reading The Notebook A History of Thinking On Paper, along with A Book of One's Own People and Their Diaries. To those, add Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, by John Gray; Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philospher, by Tom Bethell; Hoffer's The True Believer; and Neil Postman's Technopoly is in the active pile as well.

I shouldn't leave out Two Navies Divided, by Brian Laverly a history of the British and American navies in WW II. That one got a little sidetracked by this "tools for thought" distraction.

I don't know. I've started The Artist's Way more than a couple of times. I did morning pages for a while, until my crowded desk, disgust with my handwriting and the inability to stick with anything for very long, kind of let that slip away. My handwriting is slightly better, well, much better, since I've been writing cards to my mom. My biggest problem is my brain gets ahead of my hand, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to write next rather than focusing on my handwriting. As soon as that happens, it deteriorates. If I can keep my focus on my handwriting, it's pretty legible and almost not embarrassing.

There's a kind of cognitive dissonance constantly going on in my head, as I seem to be watching the death of American democracy, the opening stages of the collapse of this civilization. and the profoundly stupefying inability of supposedly "rational" human beings to do anything about it, carrying on as if none of it was happening or even cheering it on.

I don't know that if I read enough books, or parts of enough books, I'll be able to achieve a sort of spiritual non-attachment to the unfolding catastrophe, but it does pass the time.

There seems to be an unresolved tension in how humanity views itself in modernity. Apparently the individual, especially the rights of the individual have been elevated above, what? The masses? We seem to have all embraced Invictus, masters of our fates and captains of our souls. While simultaneously running the ship of civilization aground despite all the charts and aids to navigation available to us that we are perversely hell-bent on ignoring.

Hoffer regards followers of mass movements as weak individuals, unable to accommodate themselves to the demands of freedom. But human beings are social animals, and we associate ourselves in groups, social organisms of various sizes and scales, belonging to more than one at any given time. "No man is an island." We need to be among other people. We should spend more time thinking about the kinds of people with whom we wish to associate.

I'd say that our understanding of freedom is incomplete at best, and utterly wrong at worst. We lack the cognitive capacity, to say nothing of sufficiently reliable information, to act as completely independent, "rational" agents at all times. We rely on habits and customs to get through our daily activities. We take cues, consciously or unconsciously, from the people around us.

I think Rheingold's artless construction, "smart mobs," implicitly recognizes the liberation an individual experiences being part of a mob, redeeming its inherent and terrifying thoughtlessness through technology, rendering them "smart." We worship our technology as the means of our redemption. And our technology is never as good as we wish to believe it is. It's the defining delusion of modernity.

We have lost the plot, and I fear there is little hope of regaining it.

But I think we have to try. I don't know if anything I'm doing helps in any way. Perhaps it's best to "Don't just do something! Stand there." Unconventional strategies and so on.

Anyway, sorry to be a buzzkill in this "season of joy." Was trying to think of something to blog about and this came to mind. So I gave myself permission to post it.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:40 Tuesday, 12 December 2023